David Miller, a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee and a former CAC Co-chair, describes how citizen involvement has played a critical role in achieving many of the LIS Partnership’s successes over the past 40 years.

By David Miller

Citizen action started on Long Island Sound long before the EPA Long Island Sound Partnership (now the Long Island Sound Partnership) started in 1985, with examples like my mother advocating to end pollution as a Connecticut Garden Club conservation leader in the sixties, or in the seventies with the formation of groups like the Long Island Sound Task Force (now Save the Sound). But it was not until the formation of the National Estuary Program, authorized through Congress, and thus our own LIS Partnership program, did all of these emerging voices find a path to come together. In the mid-1980’s, after the Partnership started, the Long Island Sound Citizens Advisory Committee was formed which brought together representatives concerned about Long Island Sound from Port Jefferson all the way around Long Island Sound to New London. Most of these leaders had never met each other nonetheless worked together for a common cause. The Advisory Group was to begin a process with Government agencies to begin to develop and enact a Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the future of the Sound, a tradition we are celebrating and enacting today.

With this task before all involved, groups with leadership from the National Audubon Society came together with all Long Island Sound leaders and created a program to amplify public involvement called Listen to the Sound. This program held close to a dozen citizens hearings around Long Island Sound collecting testimonials from hundreds of citizens and institutions with over 1,500 people in attendance. Its end result was a Citizens Agenda for the Sound which to this day has been cited as the basis for the original CCMP that was enacted in the mid-1990s.

The Long Island Sound Citizens movement was united, had an agenda and through the future work of the Citizens Advisory Committee and its members was a model of citizens advocacy across the country. The movement created Sound-wide coalitions in the 1990s to implement the CCMP and formed a new groundbreaking partnership entitled the Clean Water Jobs Coalition. With environmental leaders’ standing arm and arm with union leaders and construction industry partners, some of the largest investments to date were enacted to restore and expand the operations of wastewater treatment plants around the Sound, the most direct threat to the Sound and source of the hypoxia (low levels of oxygen) crisis. And in addition to reducing nitrogen pollution to combat hypoxia and creating a cleaner Sound, thousands of jobs were created and the economy benefited.

And with further leadership from additional members of the Citizens Advisory Committee such as Citizens Campaign, Save the Sound, and others in early the 2000s through 2020, historic legislation was passed by Congress for the restoration and stewardship of Long Island Sound authorizing over $40 million in federal funding annually for the program. An incredible achievement that still remains in place through 2025.

So, in the end as we mark this anniversary for the Long Island Sound, citizen advocacy has been the fuel and in turn has gone hand in hand with governmental programs that have successfully restored its waters to numerous conservation goals. While more work remains and the job is not done, it can be clearly said that the citizens of Long Island Sound did truly “Listen to the Sound” and they continue to do so.

Before retiring in April as director of the EPA’s Long Island Sound Office, Mark Tedesco wrote this blog on what new- and mid-career environmental managers should know to help in their commitment to continue the Sound’s return to health and abundance.

On November 1, 2024, I announced that after 38 years with EPA, 35 of which were dedicated to Long Island Sound, I would be retiring in spring 2025. What still seemed distant and abstract then, now seems imminent and real. In my farewell communication in an official capacity, I feel duty bound to provide my subjective perspective on the past four decades in the form of four observations that I hope have some utility for those starting or continuing their commitment to a healthier, more abundant Long Island Sound.

1. Shifting baselines syndrome cuts both ways.  

In the absence of past information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. In the environmental field this is usually associated with people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions continually being lowered. But in the case of Long Island Sound public perceptions now are much better than they were four decades ago. Cartoons like the one published by the New Haven Register in 1987 depicting Long Island Sound as…well see for yourself in the figure, are unthinkable. This is a good thing, evidence that the concerted public-private partnership to restore Long Island Sound has been successful. But it can also lead us to forget how bad things got and to take for granted the work, the policy, and the investments that effectuated the positive change in Long Island Sound.

2. People perceive the pain of losing something to be greater than the pleasure of gaining something of equal value.

Called loss aversion, this tendency was first described by Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman. Applied to Long Island Sound, this means that if the improvements in Long Island Sound reverse, the public will feel that loss even more than the satisfaction gained in its restoration. Any backsliding will be painful and punished. Instead, the Long Island Sound effort must continue common sense steps to further Long Island Sound’s return to abundance.

3. There is no new thing under the sun.

While innovation and experimentation is to be applauded and practiced, there is much to be learned from past efforts. Every few years a new term arises to describe a formula of systematic approaches to identifying problems and collaborating on solutions. This is a good thing if built upon a foundation of past public policy and management efforts. Published nearly fifty years ago, The Urban Sea: Long Island Sound (Koppelman et al. 1976) and Long Island Sound: An Atlas of National Resources (CTDEP 1977) provided cross disciplinary perspectives that laid a foundation for Long Island Sound management programs. Contemporaneous to these efforts was the development of comprehensive, interdisciplinary regional management plans, either centered around the Sound (New England River Basin Commission 1975), or directed at portions of the watershed (e.g. Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board 1978).  Those planning efforts were ambitious in scope and remarkable for the breadth of federal, state, local, and public involvement in their development.  Even today they are instructive reading, particularly for those in their early or mid-career.

4. Stick to the facts.

There is room for both optimists and pessimists in this world, but each needs to relax and only base strong opinions on facts. This perspective was championed by Hans Rosling, a public health physician and author of Factfulness (2018). There is much evidence, accumulated facts, that the quality of human life on the planet is better today than 40 years ago. Yes, there are problems, big ones, that need to be addressed. But who better than you, with your intelligence and drive, your passion and compassion, to make Long Island Sound and, yes, the world, even better tomorrow than today and better than forty years ago.  It’s hard but deeply satisfying, important work.

It’s 4.a.m. The alarm sounds. AWW-UU-GAAA. AWWW-UUU-GAAA. Pitch black. I rush quickly out of bed to shut off my annoying alarm before I wake my entire family. After a quick shower, I pull on multiple layers of warm clothes before heading out the door to drive to the dock to join my colleagues on board the Research Vessel John Dempsey for the monthly survey of water quality in Long Island Sound.  I’ve got to be there by 6 AM. At least it’s not snowing this morning, the seas should be calm, and we’re heading east so we should have a great sunrise, even if the temperature is only 21ºF.

The state agency I work for, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (CT DEEP), has been conducting water quality monitoring in the Sound since 1991. The monitoring is year-round, even during the coldest parts of the winter, because winter conditions can lead to poor water quality in the summer (more on that later).

A typical survey takes us three days to complete; we take the ship to as many as seven locations per day, traveling as much as 15 miles between stations, to check on the health of Long Island Sound. We deploy heavy monitoring equipment called a rosette sampling array to the bottom depths of the Sound to collect water samples. As we sort out these samples in the onboard lab to prepare them to be analyzed later, the Captain steers the ship to the next station to make sure we keep on schedule. This is no cakewalk in the best of conditions, but just wait until you have to sample in the winter…. with below-freezing temperatures and an average 2.5-foot chop; with occasional 4-foot seas. Crew safety is of the utmost concern, especially around cold water.

While our fluorescent orange Coast Guard-approved float coats aren’t debuting on the New York fashion runways, they must be worn during deployment of any gear. We do not want to find ourselves in situations similar to Cold Water Boot Camp. Additionally, gloves, whether they are fishermen’s waterproof insulated gloves or nitrile gloves worn over stretch knits, are a must when deploying the rosette. Bare skin on cold, wet metal… no triple-dog dares aboard this research vessel. 

It’s not so easy to deploy and retrieve our rosette sampling array which is used to collect water samples and houses our multi-parameter sonde (an instrument probe). The rosette sampling array is basically a 200-pound metal circle to which we attach 5-L Niskin sampling bottles. An electro-mechanical signal is sent through a cable to the trigger mechanism on the rosette, closing the bottles and collecting a sample. During winter surveys the trigger mechanism can freeze, when this happens we break out the heat gun and gently melt any ice that accumulated on the plastic pins.

Another challenge to sampling during the winter involves the sonde.  While the sonde itself operates in water temperatures between -5 and 50ºC, it needs to be stored at temperatures above 0ºC. Being on the deck while transiting from station to station subjects it to temperatures and wind chills below zero; we’ve lost quite a few pH probes to freezing. So we bring it inside the cabin after every cast when the thermometer shows air temperatures below 0ºC.

Have you ever tried to pour water from one Snapple bottle into another while riding a roller coaster? I haven’t either, but it’s analogous to filtering water in rough seas. After we collect the water in the Niskins, we bring them into our shipboard laboratory where the water is filtered. The filtrate and filters are sent to the University of Connecticut for analyses.    

So why do we sample in the winter anyway? We are concerned about hypoxia, which is when the Sound’s dissolved oxygen levels fall below 3 mg/L.  Hypoxia is harmful to fish and other wildlife, and can even lead to fish kills. Fish that can scatter avoid the “dead zone” entirely. While hypoxia occurs in the summer, winter is a period in which some of the conditions that cause hypoxia, such as the growth of plankton blooms stimulated by excess nutrients such as nitrogen can occur.  Our winter surveys are aimed at capturing the winter/spring plankton bloom as well as spikes in nutrient concentrations associated with the spring thaw that increases the amount of runoff from snow and ice melt into rivers and streams and eventually the Sound.  The timing and magnitude of the bloom have implications for the severity and extent of hypoxic conditions seen over the summer.

It’s 4:30 PM. The sun is disappearing behind the clouds. As we finish up our day out on the Sound and enter Milford Harbor, I’m happy that we won’t have to break ice getting to the dock today and I long for the warm sunny days of summer sampling.

Katie O’Brien-Clayton is an Environmental Analyst with the CT Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Long Island Sound Monitoring Program. She has been with the program since 2006. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Marine Science from Southampton College in 1999.

Information about the initial monitoring plan developed for Long Island Sound is available on the Long Island Sound Partnership website. Information about the CT DEEP LIS Sampling Program is available on our website at www.ct.gov/deep/liswaterquality.

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A Really Cold Day Onboard the Dempsey

Could a hurricane make landfall and do serious harm to the Long Island Sound coast and the rest of New England? That was a question Peg Van Patten, Communications Director of Connecticut Sea Grant, raised in an article, “A Hurricane in New England?,” which she wrote for NOAA’s climate.gov website in 2010. The article describes the latest research at that time on predicting extreme weather events with a look back seven decades to when a really really big storm devastated Long Island Sound and the rest of the northeast–The Great New England Hurricane of 1938, also known as the Long Island Express. In that storm, around 600 people died (estimates vary) and damage in 2010 dollars was $5 billion.

Fishermen in Stonington, Connecticut, carry a wicker basket containing human remains found at the waterfront following the New England Hurricane of 1938. Photo by A. Morgan Stewart, The Day, courtesy of Peg Van Patten.

Of course, soon after Van Patten’s article was published, Long Island Sound was hit with Tropical Storm Irene, followed by Superstorm Sandy, two devastating storms that showed that not all hurricanes and tropical storms veer toward the oceans as they move up from the south.

Superstorm Sandy, a storm that transitioned from a hurricane to a post-tropical storm, was a particularly unusual event. Typically hybrid storms form in the ocean and become weaker. In this case, when Hurricane Sandy merged with an extratropical winter storm it made a left turn, veering west toward the east coast. It also got bigger and regained its strength, helping to make it one of the most costly and deadly storms in our history.

Most scientists agree that attributing specific extreme weather events such as Superstorm Sandy is challenging because these events by definition are rare. But as Van Patten pointed out in her article, many scientists believe that with a warmer climate, warmer, moister atmospheres over the oceans will result in stronger storms.

Predicting the frequency of extreme weather events is also difficult, but the northeast  experience a hurricane making landfall about once a decade over the past hundred years, although few have had the impact as Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and the Great Hurricane of 1938.

Peg Van Patten’s article, “A Hurricane in New England?” is also an account of how her father’s family from Stonington, CT survived the 1938 storm. Van Patten included photographs from her father’s collection to highlight the storm’s impact.